Use ADU commands to create or change the definitions an ACMS application uses, or to gather information about your own work or that of an ACMS application. You can issue ADU commands interactively or in a command file.

To create an ACMS application, use ADU commands to reset your data dictionary default directory during a session, as well as write, change, copy, delete, and compile definitions for tasks, task groups, menus, and applications. Use other ADU commands to build or rebuild task group, menu, and application database files.

To gather information about your work, you can use ADU commands to check the version of ADU on your system, log an interactive session to a file in your default directory for later reference, check if logging is active, and verify the work a command file performs during execution. To gather information about an ACMS application, you can use ADU commands to list the contents of task group, application, or menu database files, so you can check the consistency of procedure names, workspaces, and servers. See the VSI ACMS for OpenVMS ADU Reference Manual for a detailed explanation of the syntax of ADU commands.

Table 1.1, ''Startup Qualifiers and Their Functions'' lists the ADU startup command qualifiers.

Many definitions share common parts. For example, suppose you always include certain default characteristics in an application definition. Instead of rewriting the same part of a definition many times, you can use %INCLUDE to put the contents of a file in a source definition.

This section lists the syntax for the ADU clauses and phrases you use to write task definitions. You use these clauses with the ADU CREATE, MODIFY, REPLACE, or EDIT commands.

A task definition is made up of clauses describing the attributes of a task and the work done when a user selects a task. Task attribute clauses can either define the implementation characteristics or the control attributes of a task.

Task attribute clauses describe general characteristics of a task, such as the workspaces used by task steps or a default server that handles processing work. You can override some characteristics by specifying the same clause with a different attribute in a step definition.

The work part of a task is defined either in a processing step or a block step made up of processing and exchange steps. You can define a single-step task or use the BLOCK WORK clause to define multiple-step tasks. ACMS lets you nest block steps so that a task can contain multiple blocks.

This section begins with overview syntax for tasks, block step phrases, exchange steps, processing steps, action clauses, and exception handler action clauses. The overview syntax is followed by syntax for individual task definition clauses and phrases.